Everyone knows that there's nothing that soothes the soul more than a meal from grandma’s kitchen. Well, if you’re in the Staten Island area, you can get a nourishing, home-cooked dinner five nights a week from Enoteca Maria, a restaurant that has spurned professionally-trained chefs in favor of grandmothers. That’s right, the kitchen is staffed entirely by grandmothers. There are more than 30 grandmas from all over the world, working on rotation and cooking a diverse range of food. The idea started when Enoteca Maria’s owner, Jody Scaravella, lost his mother, grandparents, and sister in quick succession. He used his inheritance to set up the restaurant in 2011 and immediately put an ad in a newspaper looking for grandmothers to cook regional dishes. "It was just a terrible time,” he said of losing so many important members of his family. “And I think that putting a grandma in the kitchen was an unconscious effort to make myself feel better. To sit down to eat that comforting food."
Restaurant owner, Jody Scaravella, started out hiring Italian grandmas to make home-cooked meals and comfort food.
Now he's employed grandmas from Sri Lanka, Japan, Russia, Colombia, Armenia, the Philippines. “My idea is to celebrate the diversity instead of using that diversity to divide us,” he said. “It brings us all together.”
On a regular night, there are usually two grandmothers on a shift at a time including at least one from Italy.
Jody says the energy in the kitchen is contagious and it can’t help but find its way into the dining area.
Wait, what's a grandpa doing in the kitchen?
Jody said, "When you walk through the restaurant, if you listen, every table that you pass by, they’re talking about their mothers, or they’re talking about their grandmothers."
The restaurant also employs a grandad - Giuseppe Freya from Calabria, who makes all the pasta. "He makes the ravioli, he makes the ricotta gnocchi, he makes tagliatelle, he makes the pasta sheets for our lasagna," Scaravella said. "He's fantastic."
In order to record all the recipes that have passed through Enoteca Maria, the restaurant released its first cookbook, Nonna's House, in 2015.
The eatery has a four-star rating on Yelp and the professional critics love it as well. “Who wouldn’t want to have that great, tasty, comfort food cooked by a grandmother?” wrote one reviewer. “Since Nonna is cooking, everything is made fresh, from scratch!”
But sometimes there are too many grandmas in the kitchen...
"Each one of these grandmothers feels like they're the boss because in their particular family unit, they're at the top of that pyramid,” says Scaravella. “So when you put all of these grandmothers that are all at the top in a room together, they all feel like they're in charge and they're all wondering what that other person is doing there. It can get dicey."
"I regularly get phone calls from Australia, from England, and from Italy to book reservations. I'm always flattered by that," Scaravella said. "We get a lot of people who come from Manhattan, the ferry is right down the block. That's also very flattering because there's a restaurant every 20 feet in Manhattan. Why are they coming here?"
Jody says the secrets to the restaurant’s success are what he calls the “memory dishes”. “The food that you half-remember from your childhood, or that gives you that safe, safe, warm feeling you had then, and, hopefully, they're dishes that you remember too,” he said.
Most nights the grandmothers get a standing ovation from delighted diners.
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